Pearl Buck - Gods Men

“I can never forget,” William said.

“Powerful, wasn’t she! With such charm, too!”

“She killed an extraordinary number of people.” This was Henrietta’s voice coming so quietly that it seemed almost indifferent.

“Oh well,” Mrs. Lane said, “we don’t know what provocation she had.”

“It is never right to kill people,” Henrietta said with what Mrs. Lane felt was her childish stubbornness.

William answered his sister. “It is sometimes necessary. In order that the end may not be lost, the means must sometimes be very severe.”

“Then the end is lost,” Henrietta said. She lifted her head when she said this, and Emory felt that the family was really very difficult. They seemed determined to disturb life. She turned to the younger men.

“Will, why don’t you and Jerry and the girls open the doors into the music room and roll back the carpet? I’ll play for you and we can watch you dance.”

Under cover of the music and the rhythm of brisk feet swinging into new intricate steps, William went to Henrietta.

“Let us go into my library. I would like to know what you are doing.”

She rose almost obediently and followed him, her black-robed figure upright and dignified. Since Clem’s death she had not cut her hair and now, almost entirely white, it was long enough to be coiled around her head and held at the back with a silver comb. Emory’s eyes, from the piano, followed the tall figures. It was surprising how much William and Henrietta looked like each other. Yet they were utterly unlike. Henrietta was espousing poverty for Clem’s cause. Emory had learned much about that solitary laboratory and the old scientist who worked there. And yet perhaps there was a likeness between William and Henrietta. A great deal of character and spiritual energy could be stubbornly bestowed upon something chosen and the chosen substance was changed, transubstantiated, and so deified.

Emory understood this without in the least partaking of it, kindly cynical as she was to the core of her heart, sadly agnostic, while she bowed her head. America was her country now and this her family. Her parents had been killed by one of the final buzz bombs. They had gone up to London, thinking it safe at last, and then the new horrible bombs began to fall. Poor Michael, in Hulme Castle, was still trying to make the land produce those impossible harvests under the cruelly critical eyes of the incredible government the British people had chosen for themselves after the war! William said he would never go to England until it fell. It might be a long time, it might be never. Her hands flew over the keys. She played as beautifully as ever, with a natural rhythm which she could suit as easily to a rhumba as to a waltz. Nothing made any difference so long as the music went on, the music and the dancing.

“So you see,” Henrietta was saying behind the library door which was so heavy that it shut out the music, “I shall simply keep on with Clem’s work until I succeed in what he wanted to do.”

William was too stupefied to speak. He had thought Clem a fanatic and a fool while he lived, and in so far as he had given any thought to him since his death it was to believe that Henrietta was better off alone. When he thought of Clem now it was still as the pale boy whom he had first seen in Peking in a silly quarrel with a Chinese, an affair no more dignified today as he remembered it than it had been then. He had been repelled by Clem as a pale young man in a collar too big for him, after he had become Henrietta’s husband, and there was that final folly of the day when Clem had come to his office with his absurd proposals and without any appointment. Clem never learned anything. His life had been all of a piece, all nonsense except that he had made some money for Henrietta. William had never acknowledged Clem as a part of the family and he did not do so now. Careful for once of his sister’s feelings, he made no reference to Clem. He spoke to her entirely for her own good.

“If, as you say, you have had by chance a respectable fortune left to you it seems madness to consume it on any idea so fantastic. If people were given food, which is, after all, the one basic necessity, most of them would never work again.”

Henrietta tried once more. “You see, William, it is not only that they should not be allowed to starve. I believe, and Clem did, too, that unless people are fed they will rise up against any government they happen to have. The government that first understands the anger in the hearts of hungry people will be the one that wins. People feel they ought not to have to starve for any reason whatever. Dr. Feld says that Hitler’s promises of food were the first steps to his power.”

William was walking restlessly about the room and she kept watching him. “The idea is so fantastic,” he was repeating. “Think of feeding the people of China! It can’t be done.”

“It’s got to be done,” she said. “And there are the people of India and all the other peoples.”

“Fantasy, fantasy,” William muttered.

She contradicted him flatly. “Not fantasy, William, but purest common sense. Do you know why you can’t see it? Because you and Clem worked at opposite poles. He believed the world could get better only when people were better. He believed that people themselves could make a good world if only they were free from simple misery. That was Clem’s faith. Yours isn’t that. You think people have to be compelled from the outside, shaped, ordered, disciplined, told what to do. I don’t know where your faith is — I suppose you have it, for in your own stubborn way, William, I can see you are working for the same thing Clem was.”

William was suddenly violently angry. “I deny the slightest resemblance to him! Henrietta, I tell you—”

He raised his clenched hands and saw that they were trembling and dropped them. “Clem was a dangerous man, a menace, or might have been if he had been successful. He worked at the very roots of our nation to destroy us. I don’t like to say this, Henrietta — I don’t forget you are my sister — but now that he’s dead, you had better know the truth.”

Henrietta remained calm. “Well, William, we don’t understand each other. We never did. But someday it will be proved that Clem was right. That is my faith. And when he is proved right, William, you will be defeated, you and with you the Old Tiger and his beautiful wife and all the rest of your kind. How wrong that Old Empress was whom Mother continues to worship!”

“Henrietta, you’re talking very wickedly.”

“I daresay.”

She was so calm, so immovably stubborn, that for a moment he felt quite sick with rage, exactly as he had so often felt when they were children together in China. But he managed to follow her into the hall and help her on with her wrap, a black wool cape. For she was determined to leave him and, so far as he could see, to leave them all. She would not allow him to tell the others that she was going.

“No use disturbing them,” she said in her short fashion.

So he let her out of the door himself and then stood at a window watching her. She did not call a cab. Instead she began to walk down the street, her bare head held very high, and the wind blowing hard and her cape flying out behind her. It was a clear night, and he could see a strip of stars above. At the far corner she stopped for a bus. He could still see her waiting there, and he would have continued to watch her except that one of those miserable creatures came shambling up to her. Under the light of the street lamp William saw her open her handbag and take out money and give it to the beggar, thereby encouraging, he thought bitterly, all such persons everywhere. He pulled the curtains together across the window and trembled with anger. He had been angry with Henrietta all his life, and with that fellow Clem!